Arrest Made in Airman’s Shooting With M18

I’ve been really hard on Sig Sauer lately, and not without reason. I’m not going to necessarily back off on that, either, because there’s a real problem with the P320, known in the military as the M18.

But I’m not a jackwagon. I’m not going to ignore facts because they contradict previous things I’ve written. I’ve called myself out before, after all.

To the folks in the mainstream media, that’s called “accountability,” and you should look it up.

However, now we need to shift to something more tragic than me not always getting it right.

Recently, an airman was killed. The initial reports were that the airman’s M18 had an unintentional discharge, striking and killing him. That’s all anyone knew based on those reports, but now there seems to be more to the story.

There’s been an arrest.

The Air Force has arrested an airman in connection with the July 20 death of another airman, which involved a Sig Sauer M18 and led the service to suspend the use of the pistol following the incident.

In a Friday statement, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said that the unidentified arrested person is accused of making a false official statement, obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter.

Air Force Global Strike Command pulled the M18 from use after Brayden Lovan, a 21-year-old remote targeting engagement system operator in the 90th Security Forces Group at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was fatally shot with that pistol.

An Air Force spokesman said that the suspect will be treated as innocent until proven guilty, of course, and investigators are still looking into Lovan’s death, but this raises a lot of questions about just what the hell happened.

Does this absolve Sig? Not necessarily, because we still don’t know what happened, but it seems probable that there wasn’t an unintentional discharge. There may have been, but I don’t see an involuntary manslaughter charge over a weapons malfunction, even if the individual was an idiot and not paying attention to his barrel direction.

No, it seems a lot more likely that something else happened, such as the suspect playing with his weapon, and he may have tried to use the hubbub about the P320 to cover his own actions. That would fit the charges pretty well, though I also admit I could be way off here.

Nothing about this makes this situation less tragic, obviously. An innocent young man is dead through apparently no fault of his own, and someone needs to be held accountable if they’re responsible for it. If it were Sig, then they’d need to be held accountable. As it now appears it’s another airman instead, he needs to be held accountable. It’s not difficult.

But because I’ve been hard on Sig Sauer lately, I wasn’t going to let this go without talking about it. I didn’t want anyone to think that my writing about Sig had anything to do with animosity toward the brand in and of itself or that I had no interest in being fair about things. I don’t want to hang anything on the company that they’re not responsible for, and it’s looking like this had nothing to do with them, really.

I won’t even try to make a case that they brought this on themselves because, really, if someone was going to involuntarily kill a fellow airman and lie about it, they’d have lied about it in some other way even if the Sig controversy wasn’t a thing.

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